We're Carbon Neutral! Update from our CEO | July 2025
Discovery Museum is at the vanguard. [Its] healthy infusion of STEM, outdoor, and hands-on learning is the future of K-5 and beyond education—or at least it should be.
—Representative Simon Cataldo, Nature Play Festival
Dear Friend of the Museum,
Last Friday, Discovery Museum hosted Nature Play Festival—a day with free admission for all celebrating kids, nature, and the Museum’s industry-recognized leadership in sustainability and environmental education. We welcomed a record 3,300 visitors!
We could have called our Festival anything...but why does Discovery Museum want to make a bold statement about the importance of Nature Play?
First and foremost, because today’s children spend only a fraction of the time their parents spent playing outdoors. 75% of school districts nationally do not require even the CDC’s recommended 20 minutes of daily recess for their youngest learners. Children ages 2-5 are spending a couple hours daily on screens, increasing up to the teen years to 7-9 hours a day.
We know that playing freely outside supports and repairs children’s mental health, resilience, optimism, even their language development...it brings them together to identify and solve problems, and it stimulates imagination. And just as important, it connects them with the natural world.
Whether it be a backyard, a neighborhood park, or the wild woods, this deficit in outdoor play time means children—especially those of historically marginalized backgrounds—feel less welcome and less comfortable in nature. Parents, grandparents, and caregivers: If we don’t make nature play a priority at home, well, then, our kids won’t be getting it.
At Discovery Musem we address this with an approach we call “In, With, For.”
- First, we invite children and their families to simply be outside in nature.
- Next, our outdoor programs help them to engage, learn and grow with nature.
- Those experiences help build appreciation for our natural world which ultimately can inspire them to stand up for nature.
And right now, more than ever, we must put our collective energy toward cultivating a generation of hopeful, resilient, impassioned stewards of all our natural spaces and resources. Please, join with us and double down on raising kids who will do better!
And one more thing: children need to see that grown-ups are not just abandoning our planet, throwing our hands up, or treating conservation policy like a game of ping-pong.
At Discovery Museum, we believe that modeling action gives us all cause for optimism. This organization has understood the interrelationships of humans and the natural world since its founding and set its first goals for becoming a “green” museum way back in 2007.
We opened Discovery Woods in 2016, created a Director of Environmental and Outdoor Education position in 2018, and launched an ambitious 5-year Sustainability Plan in 2021.
This commitment by every member of our staff and Board is just a part of why we were recognized last year with a National Medal for Museum Service, our country’s highest honor for museums, awarded by the federal government.
And I am very, very proud to announce that Discovery Museum has achieved another pinnacle goal. DISCOVERY MUSEUM IS CARBON NEUTRAL!
How did we achieve this? We completed or made significant progress on all 29 action steps in our Sustainability Plan. We “went solar” and now pass our excess energy at a discount to four other Massachusetts nonprofits and 10 low-income households. We changed the supplies and materials we use and how we think about exhibit design. We changed how we renovate our spaces, what we plant in our gardens, and how responsibly we handle our—and our visitors'—waste. And the emissions of every single visitor, staff, or volunteer who drove to and from this museum each year since 2022 have been negated by our museum’s investment in carbon offsets.
How we accomplished each of these things, and the calculations and confirmation of our emissions inventory, is available to read in our recently-released Sustainability Plan Third Annual Report on our website.
On Friday, we also proudly debuted our brand-new Play Inside a Solar Cell exhibit, made possible in part by a grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. It is a completely unique, tech-free, and fun demonstration of how a solar cell works...for kids and adults, like me, who have found it hard to really understand that technology.
In short, Discovery Museum is proudly sustainable. We stand up for kids, we stand up for science, and we stand up for nature and, even more importantly (and more fun), nature play. It is the exceedingly simple starting point that changes a lot of important and impactful things for the better.
I would like to thank state Senator Jamie Eldridge, Representative Dan Sena, and Representative Simon Cataldo—all unwavering advocates for our work—for joining us and helping us celebrate kids and nature and hands-on learning. And also Liam Horsman, Regional Director for U.S. Senator Ed Markey, for joining us and presenting Discovery Museum with a Congressional citation from the Senator for our work. Each expressed support for our work and we are grateful for their advocacy.
Thank you also to the generous sponsors who helped make Nature Play Festival free for all 3,300 visitors, including Enterprise Bank and Middlesex Savings Bank—two of our longest-standing supporters—and Analog Devices.
If you joined us for Nature Play Festival, please let me know about your experience. If you'd like to get involved with our work, I would love to hear from you at mbeam [at] discoveryacton.org (mbeam[at]discoveryacton[dot]org).
Thank you for your friendship to our museum.
Marie R. B. Beam
CEO